


The Nearness of You

by hooksandheroics



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: And Then Some, F/M, Fluff, Too much fluff, also realization of feelings because apparently that's what i was born to write, drunk words but sober thoughts, wedding pact AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 17:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3736678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/pseuds/hooksandheroics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke feels like they're in a cop show and they had just found a key evidence. Which, in retrospect, might not be far from the truth because soon, they're both staring at themselves in a video recording on her laptop screen. Drunk, smiling, and totally <i>not</i> hating each other.</p>
<p>(Or that AU where they were both drunk and made a video. Not <i>that</i> kind of video, though. Sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nearness of You

To be fair, Clarke has just come from a really bad break up. And it must be written somewhere that the severity of the break up is directly proportionate to the amount of alcohol to be consumed (already consumed, her throbbing head reminds her). The heaviness in her limbs must be accounted to that, and also the dead prickling of her legs, and the warm hard body curled around her from behind, too, because –

Wait. What?

Her sharp intake of breath has the warm, hard body tensing behind her (she’s definitely ignoring the hardness that’s pressing against her ass because that is not the point here), the heaviness in her arms now known as another pair that’s decidedly not hers tightening as if by habitual impulse. She’ll admit, maybe never, that the embrace feels strangely welcome and familiar and warm and comfortable –

“Holy shit, that’s a lot of wine,” a voice rumbles on her back, the tremors of his chest sending an involuntary shiver down her back for absolutely no reason at all. Shut up.

It is then that she decides to open her eyes and survey her surroundings. Okay, she’s still in her apartment, there’s magazines strewn everywhere, and also maybe in the same amount, the number of wine bottles standing at various parts of her living room. Her laptop is open and still lit, there are two glasses of half-finished red wines atop her coffee table, and a video recorder ( _her father’s_ ) next to a precariously stacked pile of magazines… wedding magazines. What the hell?

Now that her mind is a bit de-hazed, she can correctly say that the rest of the magazines on her floor are also wedding magazines, and the website open on her laptop is a wedding venue site – which are all pretty weird when just last night she had broken it up with her girlfriend of one year.

“Clarke?” says the voice, now dangerously near her ear that she can feel the skimming of his breath on her skin. She has a split second to realize exactly who it is that she’s allowing a cuddling session with; her brain goes into a mildly panicked overdrive, chanting _it’s Bellamy_ over and over. “Are you awake?”

She coughs to clear her voice and extricates herself from his embrace, sitting up on the couch, because it’s freaking weird cuddling with your sworn _frienemy_. She immediately regrets that decision when her hangover goes full force that she has to double over and shut her eyes tight to quell the pain.

“Hey, you okay?” Bellamy asks, his sleep-roughened voice doing her _no_ favors at all. She dare not face him in fear of seeing a smirk or a condescending glare (never mind that the tone of his voice is soft and concerned, which are both unheard of whenever he’s interacting with her).

“Yeah, it’s just…” she swallows and stands. “That was just a _lot_ of wine.”

She makes her way to the kitchen to grab two bottles of water, questions whirling in her head about the prior night – of which she could _barely_ remember. She knows the reason behind the wine, but the rest – the wedding magazines, the wedding website, the Bellamy-Blake-cuddling-her-on-her-couch – they are all one big blank in her mind. Maybe _he_ remembers something.

So when she goes back to the living room, sporting a half-empty water bottle, and finds him still slumped over on the sofa but in a less compromising position, she hands him the other one and starts interrogating.

“What do you remember of last night?” she asks as she plops down next to him on her previous spot. She watches as he takes a large grateful gulp from the bottle, capping it again, and then faces her with a weird questioning glance.

“I take it you don’t remember anything, too,” he says, not really an answer, but not also a question. Which just confirms that he’s been drinking with her, too, and it’s not good. What if… what if –

“Did we – did you – ” she splutters, panic seeping into her pitch as she tries to jostle her brain. What if they had sex? Inebriated people do stupid things like that, and like not use a condom, or not pull out or something. What if she gets knocked up? She _just_ came from a break up – everybody will assume she’s been sleeping with Bellamy and assume that it’s the reason why she broke up with Lexa – oh God, what if Lexa assumes that, too?

(Confession: a long time ago, she was not opposed to having sex with Bellamy Blake. She, in fact, had a drunken thought about seducing him when he drove her home that one night a few years back, had she not thrown up in her toilet bowl with him holding her hair up for her. A discovery was made that night; drunken vomiting is a total mood killer.)

“No, we didn’t,” is his solid answer, and somehow, that eases something in her chest. “We were not naked when we woke up. I don’t think we’d care with redressing if we were _that_ drunk.”

Of course. The _idiot_ at the end of his statement was implied, but she felt it nonetheless. She scowls. “What _is_ this then? And what are you doing in my apartment?”

He averts his gaze and starts assessing the mess as well, his dark eyes scanning the room. “I don’t know – this is a _lot_ of wedding magazines. Did you get all of these?”

She blushes. Okay, she _was_ a little girl once. She once dreamed of a big white wedding in a beach, with all of her closest friends, and with her best friend to make speeches and hold her wedding gown when she pees and all that shit. She grew up – but that didn’t mean she’d throw everything away. She just had all of these carefully stashed somewhere safe, where no one would find them but her… _holy shit, did I bring these all out? To show Bellamy? Why in the world would I do that?_

“N-no,” she says, considered lying through her teeth. But since Bellamy _is_ a cop, and she had always been having troubles lying to him in particular, she backtracks and owns up. “Yes.”

He picks one up from the ground, the nearest to him, curiously not baffled by all these things, and her confession that she can basically switch careers from being a doctor to being a wedding planner. He scans the pages slowly, and she observes him with quiet fascination. This is the only time she has the chance to appreciate how attractively disheveled he looks in the morning, or how his rumpled dress shirt is almost half-unbuttoned, showing a bit of his chest. The thought of offering to unbutton the shirt all the way down has her face heating up once more, so she downs the rest of the water and slams it on the coffee table with unnecessary force.

He spares her a glance, but goes back to skimming the magazine almost immediately. And then, a piece of paper falls out from between the pages. It catches both their attentions, and they both reach for it as it floats to the ground.

He gets to it first, his brows furrowing as he reads, which has her morbidly curious as to what was written.

“What’s it say?” she asks, and feels weirdly like they’re in a cop show and they had just found a key evidence. Which is not far from the reality they have now, because when he turns it over to her, she finds herself staring at a checklist of her own handwriting.

“Appoint Raven and Octavia as co-maids of honor… Miller as best man… Monty as DJ…” she reads, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Is this… is this a wedding plan? _What was in that wine?_ “Ban Jasper from the open bar – what the heck?”

“Exactly my thoughts, too, princess,” Bellamy drawls, scooting closer to read over her shoulder. “Weird because I thought Miller was _my_ best friend, not yours.”

She has to agree with that, she and Nathan are friends, but not that close to have him speaking in her wedding – which is _not_ what this list is about, by the way. She does not know what this is about, but it’s definitely not about _her_ wedding. It could be Raven’s (Raven’s name is at the top of the list as a maid of honor, she could not be more wrong).

“Don’t panic,” he starts, and okay, she’s panicking, but isn’t that a natural reaction to this kind of dilemma? “But there’s a thing at the bottom that says ‘show video’ in angry capital letters. Maybe that’s what the video recorder is for?” he points at the device on the table with his bottle.

She bends over and grabs the thing, turning it over to see that its battery is dead; she knows for a fact that even if she doesn’t use it that much, she sees to it that it’s well kept. So it must have been used overnight. She fidgets with it and sighs loudly.

“Don’t you want to play the recording?” he asks when it became too quiet all of a sudden.

She turns to him with a deep frown. “What if it’s our sex tape?” she deadpans, the panic creeping back in. “We recorded this the whole night, what if somewhere in here we… did something?”

“I don’t think you’d want that to be shown at your wedding reception if it were porn,” he deadpans back, and okay he has a point, but they were also too drunk last night to care, right? It’s still a possibility.

“Alright, to be fair, this may also _not_ be the plan for _my_ wedding,” she defends, and glares.

He just shrugs nonchalantly, making her want to punch him not for the first time in her life time of knowing him. “Play it and get answers or just live the rest of your life with a mystery hanging above your head?”

She levels him with another glare. “You are such a drama queen.”

Still, she retrieves the memory card from the recorder and feeds it to her laptop. Soon they’re staring at her media player, awaiting its response.

It goes without saying, when they see themselves both on the screen, that they were shocked to the core. Especially when they’re both grinning goofily at the camera, both with wine glasses in hand.

_“Oh, okay, it’s recording,”_ Clarke in the video says, her eyes glassy and puffy, but smiling and content. As if a million years over that break up. The Clarke in present time feels a bit bad about it, but only a bit when she sees how Bellamy in the video has the same carefree expression on his face. It’s rare to see him like that, always the guarded one. He would hold out not laughing at her undoubtedly funny joke as long as he could, if it meant riling her up.

But something in this Bellamy takes her by surprise, a different kind, when his eyes spare a sidelong glance at her with an almost _fond_ gaze. She, in the video, notices this and elbows at him. He snaps out of whatever drunken trance he was in and faces the camera, his smile getting even wider than before.

_“Heeey! It’s Bellamy –_

_“I don’t think you need to introduce yourself, idiot,”_ she retorts.

_“See, my wife’s already a wife,”_ he tells the camera, his eyes crinkling at the corners, which is ridiculously adorable and sweet, if it weren’t for the words that left his mouth just a second ago. The Clarke in the video playfully swats at his arm, but he catches it with his hand and stares at her with this kind of smug expression that would have irritated her to no end. But the Clarke in the video seems not to mind. In fact, she has this ridiculously dazed expression on her face, which Clarke in real time would chalk up to her being inebriated.

They break out of their stupor and laugh, then Bellamy turns to the camera once more. _“We’re making this video as proof that I promised to marry Clarke when she turns thirty-five –_

_“You said forty!”_ she interjects, her eyes comically wide. His grin turns mock-thoughtful.

_“Yeah, okay that works, too,”_ he says. _“Yeah, I told her we’d marry. But just so you know, it’s totally platonic. However, we’re planning a wedding just in case she falls in love with me in the years to come.”_

Video-Clarke’s jaw drops at his sentence, but her eyes still dance with a jovial mirth. She recovers easily. _“Or you fall for me. But no, we’re doing the wedding because Octavia deserves her maid-of-honor speech, and Miller deserves his best man speech.”_

Her video-self looks at Bellamy for confirmation, but finds that he’s already staring at her with this curiously soft expression. And then, after a moment, a small smile cracks his severe expression and he shakes his head.

_“No,”_ he says. _“Not gonna happen.”_

_“What – I thought we already agreed to this!”_ she exclaims. _“Octavia’s going to be the maid-of-honor with Raven, and Miller’s –_

_“Not that,”_ he cuts in, laughing at her rambling. _“The_ falling for you _part.”_

There’s a silence where Clarke’s heart in real time stutters inside her chest, because the look on his face in the video is telling her so many different things all at the same time, that it’s hard to wrap her head around it. So she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, and sees that he is intently staring at her laptop screen. His grim expression gives nothing away; but she’s discovered a long time ago that when his expression gives nothing, it means _something_.

_“Oh,”_ she speaks in the video. _“Okay, well, how do you know? It’s totally not you to say never.”_

He spares no beat when he answers. _“Because I already am.”_

There’s a stunned silence, both in the recording and in real time, when nothing could be heard but her wild heartbeat thumping against her ribcage.

_“Bell…”_ she whispers.

They both watch as he scoots closer to Clarke, his head bending down to meet her eyes with this stubbornly determined look in his dark ones. He leans even further forward, and then, with just a hairsbreadth between their lips, he stops and speaks. _“I know we’re both really drunk right now… but can I kiss you?”_

Clarke’s heart stops, and then restarts, her cheeks feeling too warm in this room, her skin too tight, and her mind too cluttered to even process that, as her eyes train on the screen, she is nodding at his request. The Bellamy in the video nods in return and touches her lips with his.

She feels like she’s watching something private, something too intimate to be shown, and she wants to avert her eyes, but that means looking at Bellamy who is subconsciously running a finger along his lower lip, as if remembering the touching of their lips. She can’t help but feel the same, the tingling on her own lips stealing her breath away. She feels this intense urge to find out and remember how that kiss felt like, only this time, her sobriety holds her back.

They break away, them in the video, foreheads touching and breaths ragged. She watches her own face, the way her own lips were swollen, and red, but smiling and content. And then she looks at his, the way he seems relaxed and unguarded and her own chest blooms with the fondness she has never felt towards him before.

_“I liked that,”_ she says, her voice rough and breathless. There’s also that ever elusive softness in her tone, something she has never heard in her own voice spoken to anyone before. _“We can do it again.”_

He starts to lean in again, but she stops him with a finger to his lips. It doesn’t stop him from smiling and playfully kissing her digit. _“On the wedding day,”_ she hears herself say, and he nods.

_“I can wait,”_ he replies, reverence in his tone.

She could not stop the sharp intake of her breath, this time in real time, this time sober and clear minded. Everything is falling into place – the magazines, the checklist, the video. The wedding venue site on her laptop a few minutes ago even displays Bellamy’s favorite view of the ocean. Her heart aches as the realization dawns on her, the fear of ending up alone.

That was why she was drinking. It may be because of Lexa, but after what felt like the hundredth failed relationship, she felt like she would die alone and lonely and sad. Those feel like drunken thoughts, but the heavy feeling in her heart is fear all the same. It still does not explain why it’s Bellamy that’s here and not Raven or someone else… (something niggles at the back of her mind, telling her that she knows exactly why, but she denies it).

They have inadvertently fallen asleep in the video, completely forgetting about the recording device, which explains the drained battery. So she pauses it there and faces him.

“Why are you here?” she asks, her heart dreading and anticipating the answer all at the same time, and only he can make her feel like this.

“You called me,” he replies, eyes soft and pleading. For what, she doesn’t know, but her stomach flutters. “I was at work – you were crying. You weren’t making sense, you scared me so I rushed over here and saw you drowning your sorrows on your own. I couldn’t let you do this alone – I… I think I joined you for a drink, and then two, and honestly I couldn’t remember anything after that.”

“You came for me?” she asks, couldn’t keep the astonishment from her voice. “In the middle of work?”

“Well, yeah,” he replies and rubs the back of his neck, as if that’s the only answer possible. “You were murmuring about dying, okay? I was… terrified.”

She stares at him with hard eyes, her mind shooting a million questions at once, but only one thought takes the front line. She wants to feel that kiss sober. So when she comes to a decision, when she leans in until they’re face to face, he stops her with his hands on her shoulders. “What are you doing?”

“I want to do it again,” she says. “I want to do it now.”

“What?” he asks, dumbfounded for, maybe, the first time ever.

“The kiss,” she replies with more strength than she feels she has. “I want to do it again.”

This time, it is him that nods.

She kisses him, softly at first, their lips feather-light against the other. Then he opens his mouth to her, sucking her bottom lip. His tongue meets hers, and she sighs into his mouth, a sweet tingling sensation trickling down her chest and settling low in her stomach. Her hands cradle his face, his own skimming down her side. She doesn’t know how long this kiss lasted, but she’s aware of only one thing, the one thing that explains everything.

That despite everything, she really _doesn’t_ hate Bellamy Blake. Not in the least, in fact. So when he pulls away and rests his forehead against hers and asks, “So, are we still on?” in the quietest voice, she nods because he is ridiculous.

“Yeah, we are,” she replies with a blooming smile on her lips. “If it means I can do this.” She trails kisses along his jaw, her teeth nipping lightly at his stubble while her hands card through his hair and fists there. He makes a strangled groan at the back of his throat, one that she discovers she loves about him. Among other things. His fingers tighten around her hips, one hand bringing her lips to his once more.

“Thirty-five,” he whispers against her lips.

“Forty,” she replies.

* * *

 

They’re both wrong.

They show the video to their friends at their wedding reception not two years later. Octavia might have cried, but Jasper cried the hardest.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved this little piece because it's a brainchild of mine at two in the morning. I typed it out on my phone, just the outline of it, and then when I woke up the next morning, I found myself laughing out loud at how incoherent I was. 
> 
> But anyway, leave a kudos or a comment on your way out, and thank you for reading. If you want, you can come yell at me on my [tumblr](http://hooksandheroics.tumblr.com)! :)


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